For OPEN, we’re interested in doublings, triplicates etcetera, and/or play and suggestion; we’d love to read poems that open meanings, spaces, possibilities and forms, that take open as their verb and move with it, into and beyond synonyms … poems that bud, unfold, extend, splay, drape, burst; poems that take up space and poems as lacunae: absence made palpable and present.

This issue was first conceived in mid-October 2021, when states were opening up in easing lockdowns and restrictions – but for or to whom is the world open; what kinds of lives are included and visible in these discourses and their assumptions, and what kind of view or vantage point can the Australian colony take on being open – on stolen lands, with stopped boats and borders, kids in custody or indefinite detention, detained off-shore or in Melbourne’s Park Hotel nine years and counting?

What does open look like to essential workers, frontline health workers, casualised workers, those in aged care or most vulnerable to sickness and health crises, and to social inequities more broadly? We’re interested in poems as portals, in the sense Arundhati Roy once described.

Fundamentally, we’re keen on crafted poems and crafty poems: writing conscious of its own making, unmaking, and making it new, of its contexts and antecedents, but we are obviously – and axiomatically – open to all kinds of apertures.

This podcast sheds some insight on how Cordite Poetry Review (and Cordite Books) works.

Submission to Cordite 106: OPEN closes 11.59pm Melbourne time Sunday, 3 July 2022.

Please note:

1. The guest editor(s) has sovereign selection choice for all poems submitted.
2. Masthead editors will also contribute to the issue.
3. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.
5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.
6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …